This is the text of a talk given to the West London Group of the Scientific and Medical Network on 12. November, 97
Last year I was asked to write something about the self, and I decided to write about Freud and Goethe. I was interested in Goethe because I had been reading Owen Barfield, who suggested many years ago that someone should take another look at Goethe's science. He was writing about the difference between the world of appearances and the ultimate reality, which is an issue many network members will recognise. While researching this I became aware that many other people were taking an interest in Goethe, and he is now very much in the news. So this talk is about the difference between scientific and holistic thinking in general, and more particularly about the place of psychoanalysis in the history of ideas. I hope to give you a more sympathetic picture of psychoanalysis than the one people pick up from textbooks. I use three historical moments as anchors; the present state of psychoanalysis, the birth of psychoanalysis one hundred years ago, and a picture of Goethe at the height of his powers two hundred years ago.
Most people know the basic jargon of Freud's theory and the division of the mind into id ego and superego. They also know about the Oedipus complex and Freud's stages of psychosexual development, oral anal and genital. Most of the criticism I have heard in the network is of the kind that dismisses this scheme as mechanistic. People do not usually understand that Freud's thinking was extremely subtle and he never saw these concepts as things. We all make the mistake of treating our ideas as parts of reality, and that is one of the themes of this talk. The most significant discoveries that Freud made were that most mental activity is unconscious, and that the mind works in two different ways, which however are always combined. He called them primary and secondary process. By listening to what patients said, and to their dreams, Freud uncovered a completely different picture of a person from the conventional common sense one. He explained his discoveries in dialectic terms, the life force in balance with a death instinct, and the duality of love and hate.
Even though the basic system seems very outdated it is surprising how much of the detail of what Freud wrote still has the ring of truth. Also it is what happened, and there is no better alternative theory. The history of the twentieth century is inconceivable without the influence of Freud. It is hard for us to imagine the world before Freud, because he has changed the way people in the West think.
When Freud was a young man he was a passionate admirer of Goethe, and used him as a role model. A powerful romantic current flows through Freud's thinking which he often expressed in quotations from Goethe's works. Freud's writing, like Goethe's, is powerfully creative; his imagination could not be confined by the science of his time. I think Goethe's influence was central in Freud's work.
Goethe was born in 1749 and died in 1832, 27 years before Freud was born. His long life spans the vital phase when modern science and the modern mind were young and growing vigorously. Before the end of the 18th century he was already famous for his achievements as a poet, novelist and dramatist, but above all as a fully realised personality. T.J.Reed describes Goethe's life and work as monumentally normal beside many of the developments in literature since his time:
'The growing existential gloom; the pursuers of art for its own sake; the agonisers over how to write at all, the despairers of ever conveying thought; and most recently the dehumanisers of literature who would detach it from its roots in life and make it a self-referential game, sabotaging men's most valuable form of open communication by simplistic doubts about its viability. Beside all this, Goethe's normality is not antiquated but defiant and invigorating. He stands high above modernity, luminous against the dark.'Before the Enlightenment, religion was the chief source of knowledge about the world. Within the accepted framework people knew their place in what was felt to be the natural order of things. Humankind was seen as the pinnacle of God's creation, a microcosm of the macrocosm. The world was the centre of the universe. Humanity was linked through invisible connections to the rest of creation by what has since been called the Great Chain of Being There was no concept of evolution or progress; man's task was to redeem his fallen state, which was viewed as a temporary separation from the unity of the spiritual world which would be ended by death.
The astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler turned the mediaeval world inside out by showing that the earth moved round the sun. Descartes caused a similar psychological revolution when he separated the thinking self from the external world. He began by doubting everything, and came to see truth as that which can be clearly and distinctly conceived. From the existence of the doubting and imperfect subject, himself, Descartes deduced the necessary existence of a perfect God. Only an omnipotent God could account for the reliability of human reason and the objective reality of the phenomenal world. In his view everything one perceives is external to oneself. The cognitive capacity of human reason and the objective reality of the natural world had a common origin in God.
This separation formed the basis of scientific objectivity. Henceforth the world was to be explained in terms of cause and effect. This was the beginning of self conscious awareness. The centre of gravity of human thought shifted from the cosmos to the mind of the individual. The ideas and emotions a person experienced were now his or her own property, and no longer the result of external agencies or divine influence.
This meant that concepts of morality shifted from the world of action into the inner world of the individual. Strength of purpose, self control and generosity of spirit became the ultimate virtues and were used in the domination of passion by thought. The way in which people exercised their free will was the test of virtue; generosity was inseparable from dignity or self-esteem. This new moral order underpinned the achievements of science. It is often overlooked that the early scientists were devoutly religious; in the early stages scientific discoveries seemed to clarify the claims of religion. It was only much later that the moral basis of science was abandoned in the formation of the modern outlook. What started as scientific method became the only way of looking at life. By this process of separating the thinker from the thing observed, meaning has been progressively lost from the material world. This is the profound difference between our scientific age and the previous one, when meaning flowed through all things and connected them.
Goethe is significant because while he inherited the old order he belonged also to the modern world. He was part of the decline in traditional beliefs which forced every thinker to see the world with new eyes. He was also part of the new scientific age which reached its full flower during his lifetime. He pursued his own scientific investigations throughout his life. He is a symbol for psychoanal- ysis because he realised that the natural world, of which we are part, is the basis of our existence. He thought that our perception of ourselves as part of nature is what makes us value life. Goethe did not think he was discovering new facts, rather that he was opening up a new point of view. He realised that the scientific method was not the only possible one; he said scientists should be trained to observe qualities. While his contemporaries were detailing the structure of the different parts of plants, Goethe was concerned about the relationship between the parts. Through imaginative contemplation of the outward forms he came to understand the activity producing them; his theory of metamorphosis translates the nature of the plant into an idea of the plant in the mind. The plant is not viewed as an inanimate thing, it is seen as something alive, evolving and becoming. The whole universe is experienced as living and growing. In these ideas Goethe carried forward the mediaeval tradition of holistic thought. In contrast to Descartes' famous statement 'I think, therefore I am,' Goethe wrote 'I was dreaming and loving as clear as day; I realised that I am alive.'
Freud took from Goethe a holistic spiritual world view, which has been overlooked for many years but is relevant again in the light of recent developments in science. For Goethe art and nature followed the same laws. He saw in great works of art an essential truth which he experienced as identical with the workings of nature revealed by science. He paraphrased Plotinus as follows:
'If the eye were not sun-like, it could not see the sun; if we did not carry within us the very power of the god, how would anything god-like delight us?'Goethe's own scientific observations were inseparable from his interest in art, and he thought that man fulfils his potential in the same way as a flower unfolds. He realised that the human mind plays a constructive role in all knowledge and he therefore rejected the dualism of science. Rather than seeing man imposing order on nature he saw nature as permeating everything. He did not see spirit as separate from nature, rather that nature is itself spirit. He wrote that the states which scientists observed were inappropriate, because in life nothing stands still and everything is motion.
Scientific investigation has been a very powerful tool which has changed the material world enormously. It has become a widespread belief that scientific truth is the only kind of truth. The world of appearances, that which can be viewed objectively, is mistaken for the real world. As this process has continued over the past two centuries it has had the effect that people increasingly see only the appearances, or the rational. Anything that does not seem to be in accordance with the objective world ceases to have any meaning. It is not realised that this is a learned way of seeing the world, particular to our culture. By this process of alienation people are more and more cut off from the natural world and from its manifestation in their own nature.
We have been through an era when the human mind abstracted from the whole all purpose and meaning and claimed them for itself, so that the world was projected as a machine. It was psychoanalysis that began to reverse this process and put man back in touch with the deeper levels of the mind.
The idea of an unconscious mind began to take shape soon after Descartes time. Science began as a movement towards human freedom, but the separation of mental and physical into separate categories became a double bind which alienated people from nature. Goethe was one of the writers who preceded Freud in locating the origin of poetic inspiration in the unconscious. All the time there has been an alternative view, which never really went away, that the relationship of the human mind to the world is not dualistic but participatory. In this view the mind is the organ of the world's own process of self-revelation. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. To quote Goethe - in a prose translation of a sonnet:
'You must, in studying Nature, always consider both each single thing and the whole: nothing is inside and nothing is outside, for what is within is without. Make haste, then, to grasp this holy mystery which is public knowledge. Rejoice in the true illusion, in the serious game: no living thing is a unity, it is always manifold.'The wisdom of previous societies, where it was understood that everything is connected by its meaning, has largely been lost. Only a minority of people can understand that science is only one way of looking at the world. Meanwhile momentous changes have been occurring within science itself. Freud's view of mental energy was an extension of the laws of Newtonian physics, which at the time seemed rock-like in their unchangeability.
The more we learn about the world, the more we realise how little we know. Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams:
'The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs".He goes on to refer to Goethe's account of how his new creations came to him without premeditation and almost ready made.
This passage allows us to see Goethe as Freud's inspiration for his description of primary process. Freud's idea of psychic reality has been handed down to us in a restricted version, because of the strong bias towards rationality. Reading Freud with Goethe in mind restores the balance and significance of Freud's extraordinary vision, which may well have been a Goethean science of the mind. Goethe wrote:
'Since it is not possible in either knowledge or reflection to construct a whole, we must necessarily think of science as an art if we expect any kind of wholeness from it......none of the human faculties should therefore be excluded from scientific activity. The dark depths of prescience, a sure intuition of the present, mathematical profundity, physical accuracy, the heights of reason, an acute understanding , a versatile and ardent imagination, a loving delight in the world of the senses - they are all essential for a lively and productive apprehension of the moment.'I think Freud would have accepted this as a description of his own ideals.
Our understanding of psychoanalysis is being transformed by the breaking down of the rigid categories of science. There is an explosion of new knowledge which cuts across boundaries between disciplines. A great deal is known about the functions of various parts of the brain, for example, but this tells us the how and not the why of the mind. Now that science has become concerned with subjectivity and with consciousness itself, we can look forward to a new appreciation of the wholeness of the human mind. And this is where Goethe comes in. He was one of the last generation to inherit a world filled with meaning, to understand the connectedness of man and nature, and to participate fully. My aim is to show that through the passage of time and changing world views psychoanalysis can be seen as reaffirming what has been lost. Primary process, the life force, continually renews itself.
Goethe thought his scientific investigations were more important than his poetry. He saw that the scientific method which came into full flower in his lifetime was not the only possible one; it was inadequate for dealing with the phenomena of life and growth because the process of becoming eludes the categories of cause and effect. Science is now catching up with him. I will quote the biologist Mae-Wan Ho:
'The essence of organic wholeness is that it is distributed throughout its constituent parts so that local and global, part and whole are completely indistinguishable. The organism's activities are fully coordinated in a continuum from the molecular to the macroscopic. There is something very special about the wholeness of organisms that is only captured by quantum coherence. An intuitive appreciation of quantum coherence is to think of the I that each of us experiences as our own being. We know that our body is a multiplicity of organs and tissues, consisting of many billions of cells and astronomical numbers of molecules, all capable of working autonomously and yet somehow cohering into the singular being of our private experience. That is just the stuff of quantum coherence. (Ho, 1996, p 241)It is also just the stuff of Goethe's perception of nature, and it could also be an account of Freud's concept of primary process. Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was that organisms must continually change in order to be themselves. This view is now current again; organising principles are recognised in all levels of structure, including the simplest, and within individual cells. The concept of information has replaced mass and energy as the key to understanding life.
Consciousness can be seen as a sense organ for the perception of inner mental activity. The unconscious mind is therefore similar in kind to all the other natural processes of which we have knowledge. The distinction between mind and body is a distinction between different perceptual modalities. The brain does not exist separately from being experienced. The essence of human thought is the interconnectedness of all things once the duality of alienation has been overcome through self knowledge.
If there is a unifying self, surely it is that self which creates our dreams. A century on we can see much better than Freud could, that there is a limit to a rational understanding of dreams. The essential creativity and unpredictability of dreams lie at the heart of psychoanalysis. Primary process thinking has its own logic, which forms the basis of the personality. Freud understood how the events of the day were interwoven with past memories in the formation of dream images. He described how the process of condensation and the elimination of time and contradiction produced the dream thoughts. However it is no longer possible to hold his other view, that this subtle process has as its aim the discharge of repressed wishes. The only sensible view is that waking and dreaming consciousness are complementary forms of mental activity. Dreaming is an ancient function which we share with animals. It is likely that it plays a role in the survival of the species. Paying attention to our dreams is one way of reversing the splitting processes that fragment society.
This is a condensed version of the final chapter of ' Midwifery of the Soul: a holistic perspective on Psychoanalysis.' published in March 1998 by Free Association Books, 57 Warren Street, London W.1. ISBN 1 85343 391 8 p/b.